


Clarity

by Amand_r



Series: Gold Dust Universe [5]
Category: Torchwood
Genre: Gen, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-30
Updated: 2011-04-30
Packaged: 2017-10-18 19:57:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/192672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amand_r/pseuds/Amand_r
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ianto wonders what Evan will call him when he feels too old to say "Daddy". 'Papa' isn't any more mature. He will probably switch to "Father". And it is too late to get Evan to call him "Tad", not when he already calls Jack "Dad". It's one of many things that he thinks he would like to do differently. Like say, with another kid.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Clarity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [askance](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=askance).



> This was written for askance in the help_haiti auction. She requested the following: _post Gold Dust - how did Pen come to be born with such a big gap between her and her brother? Or maybe how her birth changes the family dynamic._ There you go. Thanks to blue_fjords for the awesome beta work.

**IANTO:**

Jack and Ianto are buried in work. It is a self-imposed thing—they want to get everything out of the way because this Saturday, they have been informed by everyone in the Hub, they are not allowed to be there. Ravi and Claire are taking the shift, and Gwen will be on standby. Ianto and Jack are on what Gwen calls "stand-stand-by," and it loosely interprets to, "apocalypses only". Evan only turns seven once, you know.

So all the stuff that they usually save for Saturday (Ianto says, 'Saturday is paperwork day, so that you appreciate Sunday more.' Jack then says, 'What's Sunday?' And Ianto looks at him and shrugs. 'One of the other days of the week.') is on their desks, and occasionally Jack will call down to Ianto, 'WHERE THE HELL IS THE—' and Ianto will cut him off, saying, 'UNDER THE B-890'S IN THE SECOND DRAWER.' It's that kind of thing.

Ianto cracks his knuckles and sits back, looking at the neat stack of buff folders and the empty space on the blotter in front of him. It's a glorious thing, actually, to be done, and he spares a thought to ponder how many dead trees are on his desk, which, if he were to be fair, would also include the desk itself. It also bears thought that in the middle of the advent of paperless offices, Torchwood, with all its alien tech, still has paper copies of everything. Some day he'll have to address that with Jack.

'All this is done,' Jack says, setting the pile of folders and paper on Ianto's desk. 'Did you know that my desk has a blotter on it from 1968?'

Ianto smiles. 'That desk is only seven years old,' he says.

Jack doesn't say anything. This is a remnant of the times when he used to be able to get away with silly jokes like that and he forgets sometimes that the old Hub is gone, has been gone for a long time and nothing in this new place is even remotely old. Even if they had simply moved locations, they could have brought stuff with them. But nope, as Evan said the other night re: the test marshmallow in the microwave—it asploded.

Instead, Jack straightens the stack of files in Ianto's complicated system that consists of three baskets, mysteriously colour-coded. In reality, the colours are there for his amusement, not because they mean anything. He enjoys watching everyone attempt to leave a file in the right box and then pause in consternation when they have no idea what the colours mean. Sometimes he switches the colours about on purpose, just to keep them on their toes.

'I think I'm hip to your square, here, partner,' Jack drawls, and sets the files on the desk, well away from the coloured baskets. 'There is no plan.'

Ianto makes a big show of checking his watch. 'It took you ten years to figure this out.'

Jack stretches and yawns. 'Well, sometimes I'm a slow learner.' And then, 'I'm tired. I've been working all day.' He does that thing where he splays his hands on his back and sides and bends back, like Lisa used to do when she was very pregnant. It feels off, old-timey. Old man. He'd tell Jack that, but age jokes are tricky when you are Jack and Ianto, and when you are cranky. And tired.

And armed.

'I want to go home,' Jack says. 'Where we live,' he adds and they smile absently into the air because that's what Evan used to say every time they used the word "home" in any sentence. _Home is where we live. Let's go home--where we live. This milk is homogenised—where we live._ And once when they had been out without Lisa and had a little bit of a run-in, _Homo--where we live_. It is odd the things that stick with one well after they are over.

'I'm wanting some bananas,' Ianto murmurs into the silence. 'I just want them.'

Jack leans on his desk, his head on his arms and says something about ASDA. They have it perfected: Jack drops Ianto off at the doors, does two laps of the parking lot, and by the time he comes around after the second pass, Ianto is waiting at the door with the shopping bag that they keep stowed under the seat of the passenger side of the SUV. Like everything else, after over ten years, it's a thing; once again, their kind of thing.

Ten years. Ianto wants to say something about that sudden realisation, but he's too tired, and there's nothing to say. Not even Lisa can make a big deal about it.

Speaking of, he presses the button for the speakerphone and home on speed dial. Jack just lays his cheek on the desk and closes his eyes. His fingers hook over the end of the desk, and if they both weren't so tired Ianto might be tempted to take advantage of the fact that Jack's arse is _right there_. So he kills two birds with one stone and rolls his chair right behind Jack and runs his hands along the back of his belt, hooking two fingers in the loop at the small of it before letting go and unbuttoning the braces from behind.

Lisa picks up just as Jack says, 'Oh you cheater.'

Ianto presses his face into the seam of Jack's trousers and imagines what he could do if they weren't clothed, and Lisa sighs. 'Now is not the best time for one-phay ex-say, gentlemen. Little ears.'

Jack pushes his arse back, and Ianto's face is mashed into it for a second. 'Uh, ah,' he says when he lifts his head. 'Going to ASDA.' Jack lets go of the edge of the desk and falls backwards into Ianto's lap, and the chair rolls a few feet before it hits Gwen's desk. Ianto reaches around to hold him so that he doesn't fall, but it also allows him to unbuckle Jack's belt, bury his face in the material of his shirt, still slightly damp from being pressed into a chair for three hours.

'Jack, stop smothering him,' Lisa says, and her voice has that amused tone he likes to think is flavored with butterscotch. Jack wiggles his arse in Ianto's lap, and yeah, that doesn't help. On the other hand, he doesn't need any help.

'Is there, ah, anything you need?' he gasps when Jack reaches back with one hand and sticks his reversed fingers into his belt, squirming in enough so that the tips of them brush his hard cock.

Lisa jostles the phone, and he's surprised that he even notices, what with Jack being a living breathing distraction, and the chair tipping precariously enough to deserve a corner of his attention. 'Well, since you mention it, get a few pregnancy tests.'

Jack freezes and Ianto reaches out to still the chair, since they had started to spin on it a little. 'Uh whut?'

Lisa snickers into the phone. 'You heard me.'

 _Click._

***

Lisa isn't upset, but she's not bouncy either, and he knows that's because she doesn't like to get upset or excited about things until they're a certainty. That kind of thinking just causes anxiety.

He wonders sometimes if Lisa hadn't had more repairs to her than just the nerves of her spine. Did the doctors of New Earth implant a Buddha chip? And that is unfair, and not a little sickening when he thinks about the Cybermen and how he will never ever let anything cybernetic touch his body, knowing that goes double for Lisa.

Evan is asleep; it had been bathtime when they'd called, hence the pig Latin, and Ianto opens his door to watch him for a few seconds before Lisa's hand on his waist tells him that it's time. Ianto opens his closet to dig out his stopwatch—he hasn't carried it for a while, not since it had been broken in a clash with a Hoix and he'd had to send it away to have it repaired. But when he unearths it, the warming metal in his hand makes him feel safe, in control. He tucks the box for it back on the shelf next to the big plastic bag that holds all the gifts they've bought Evan for his seventh birthday this Saturday.

Seventh birthday. It's not mystical or anything, unless one discounts that his daddy is only alive because he took a trip through time in a big blue box. Or, that his other daddy came from the future in that box (sort of).

Jack is waiting for them in the toilet, instructions laid out and boxes tucked into the rubbish bin. They don't even leave the room while she pees on the stick, they're way past that, really, and apparently this whole thing about "first morning's urine" is long gone from the routine, so there's none of that pesky waiting through the night. They stare at all the tests and Jack picks the one that gives the results in a word, because he finds that amusing. Ianto isn't amused.

Lisa holds the stick up and says, 'Three minutes,' and Ianto starts the watch, letting it tick in his hand.

'In the movies, the woman already knows before she tells anyone,' Ianto says, and Lisa sets the stick down on the edge of the sink. Jack peers at it from a few inches away.

'I want you to give some thought to the fact that you just applied movie logic to our life,' she murmurs, sitting on the edge of the tub. Ianto looks at the stopwatch in his hand. Good old stopwatch. Three minutes. Three minutes until a piece of litmus paper tells them that they're going to have to reorder their universe.

'We'll need something larger,' he says. 'Well, I suppose we could always convert the third bedroom. It wouldn't be the first time that you've had to shove over, Jack,' he says, looking at Jack, who had rather expanded back into the third room when Lisa had quit her UNIT job and they had given back all their proprietary equipment. 'I don't remember the Lamaze stuff, though,' he murmurs, peering at the carpet on the floor of the room and wondering why anyone would carpet a bathroom. Did they do this? 'The mold under this carpet must be horrifying.'

Jack pushes him a little so that he sits on the seat of the toilet. Ianto thinks about it. He shouldn't be this hesitant. He'd been overjoyed when Lisa was pregnant last time, and good god, it wouldn't be a bad thing. Once you have one baby, can the next one be that much different? Harder? No, surely the second one is easier, and now that he's done it once, he gets kids, he really does, and he—

'Time,' Jack says.

Ianto glances at the stopwatch. 'Two minutes.'

Lisa sighs and leans forward, but Jack stops her. 'You'll jinx it.'

It's funny, the idea of jinxing science with behaviour. 'What will we do?' she says, and Ianto stares at her for a second, because she was supposed to have the answers.

Jack shrugs. 'Time.'

'Two minutes thirty.'

Jack presses his hand into the top of Ianto's head, and it feels like something he's done before, though Ianto can't remember it. He leans down and presses a kiss to Ianto's forehead, and then when Lisa snorts at them, one to her cheek.

'Time.'

'Three minutes.'

They both sit there for five seconds more, who knows why, and Jack is standing, but he deliberately doesn't look down and to his right. His face twitches a little, well, Ianto is imagining that, but his eyes are filled with something, they have that gleam they get when Jack is excited for something new. Ianto wishes that he could share his enthusiasm. He wishes that this could all be some fantastic adventure and they could tumble through life in the manner of some devil-may-care person with a more than normal life span, and that—

'Oh,' Lisa says, the stick in her hand. 'I didn't think it would be. I thought I was just stressed or….' She doesn't finish.

Ianto clicks the stopwatch and Jack's fingers on his head twitch with the sound of it. 'Well,' he says into the silence, because he isn't sure just where to start with it. 'Well, we could. This is good, right?' He looks at them, trying to gauge their emotions from the blank faces they sport and failing. 'A baby is good.'

Jack smiles, and it's painted—there and real but not. His hand pulls away from Ianto and he reaches up to unbutton his shirt. 'Sure. Babies are fun.'

Lisa doesn't move, and Ianto isn't sure if this is one of those times to be happy without her permission, or sad without her permission. Her lips are pursed and she taps the stick on her knee absently. 'Well, what do you want to do?' she says, to both of them, to neither of them, to herself, maybe. Might as well ask Evan what he wants to do.

It occurs to Ianto that this time, in his head, he is already convinced it's his. Is that why he's reticent? Does it matter? I hadn't mattered last time. Does it matter this time? Ianto's gaze slips down to Lisa's belly, to the little critter buried in her innards. Is it a boy? Is it a girl? Is it his? What if it were a girl, what would _that_ be like?

At that very moment, he realises that he desperately wants it to be a girl, and then in that moment he realises that he wants it. Her. Him.

But he's not the only vote, and maybe they should have a ballot or a talk about all their options or lay them all out on the table, flat and non-judgmental, before they all state what they want. He senses that they're going to have to use the "I feel" statements, and he hates the "I feel" statements. They all hate them, actually, but they have learnt that like choking down the occasional dose of Beecham's when one is sick, sometimes doing what one doesn't like doing is still useful.

Jack takes the stick from her and throws it in the bin. 'We're going to bed,' he announces and they look up at him as if he is the one in control. Ianto realises that Jack is right, and that maybe they should get some distance on this moment. He doesn't like admitting that Jack is right, and that might just be rebellion, but there it is. He wonders if Lisa is resentful of Jack taking charge, or if she knows that he's right, or if she even thinks that's what he's doing. Jack's voice doesn't have his "I am the Captain of Torchwood" tone to it, but it tastes like he's ordering Ianto around.

They go to sleep, three silent islands on the bed, but when Ianto wakes in the middle of the night, Lisa has shifted closer to him, and Jack to her, so that they are almost crowding him from the mattress. He gets up and fetches a glass of water, checks on Evan in his room almost out of habit, and stands at the window of their bedroom for a minute, staring at the nearly full moon and thinking about the jobs he'll have to do tomorrow, about what Lisa will want him to do to get the house ready for Evan's birthday party on Saturday. Balloons, surely he'll have to do something atrocious with balloons and crepe paper. Right now Evan is obsessed with the X-Men, so everything is garish red and yellow and blue, and Jack had offered to dress up as Wolverine before Lisa had vetoed it.

The clouds skirt over the moon, enough illumination still to see by though, and when he turns back to the bed, Lisa is in the center of the bed, the covers kicked down to her knees, and the white of them against her dark skin makes her glow. Jack has thrown a leg over her knees a bit, and one of his hands is on her belly, flat and fingers spread. When Ianto moves, he sees the glimmer of Jack's eyes when he opens them, and they blink.

Well then, morning discussion will be interesting. Ianto slides in as gently as he can, pulls the sheet up over them, settling it at their waists, and then he turns into the curve of Lisa's shoulder, breathing in her perfume residue and the smell of the fabric softener from the sheet under them, the pillow under the top of his head. His hand finds Jack's on her stomach, and they rest there, unmoving, weighted, like human shields.

***

At breakfast the next morning, Lisa reads the paper and Jack and Evan bond over bowls of frosted sweetened cereal. Ianto nurses his coffee in silence, waiting for someone to say _something_ , but no one does.

The sun streams in the windows and he can see the streaks on them. Someone should wash them before Saturday. It gets added to his mental list (Years ago he discovered that his mental to-do list topped out at fifty items. Beyond that even memory techniques elude him.).

Jack and Evan have unearthed the toy from the cereal box, and Jack is busy trying to decipher what a Digimon does, and Evan is patiently explaining it to him. Jack plays stupid so that Evan can get his teacher hat on, playact being the grown up one. In the end, Jack sets the thing in the center of the table next to the bouquet of tea roses that Lisa had brought home from work and he and Evan argue over whether or not you can rename things that already have names.

Ianto finishes his coffee and refolds his cuffs, reaching for the cufflinks in his shirt pocket and sitting back, slouching for a minute before he assembles himself. The waistcoat is unbuttoned and open, the jacket still in the front closet. Lisa peeks over the paper and watches him, her eyes riveted to his fingers and he makes a good show of it for her. Jack and Evan drink the milk from their bowls and slam them down like they've just done double shots of Yagermeister. Jack sits back and Evan leaves to load their bowls in the autowasher; they have him trained.

Lisa runs her fingers through Evan's hair when he passes her, and she must not like what she finds, because she makes a face. 'Hey honey,' Lisa murmurs, 'Can you go get mummy's hairbrush?'

Ianto goes back to staring out the windows at the gulls on the patio. They'll have to spray bird shite off the stones, and that goes on his mental list. Jack creaks back in his chair, cup of coffee in his hands, ghost of a smile on his face.

This would be a good time to have that discussion. Yet.

'Does this mean I'm to have a little brother?' Evan says, setting one of the opened but unused pregnancy tests on the tabletop. Ianto glances from it to his face, open but slightly wary.

Jack chokes on a mouthful of coffee, dribbling down his shirt, and Lisa stares at the test and then at Evan's face before sitting forward, folding the paper along lines of her own devising. Ianto refills his mug from the pot on the table.

'Would you like a little brother?' Ianto finally asks, because Evan is regarding him, not Jack or Lisa. Ianto has realised over the past few years that while Evan goes to Lisa for comfort, and to Jack for fun, he goes to Ianto to speak. To speak 'like a grown-up'.

Evan considers it, head tilted to the side. 'I think I would.' A glance at Jack. 'He would give Dad someone else to play with.'

Ianto wonders what Evan will call him when he feels too old to say "Daddy". "Papa" isn't any more mature. He will probably switch to "Father". And it is too late to get Evan to call him "Tad", not when he already calls Jack "Dad". It's one of many things that he thinks he would like to do differently.

Like say, with another kid.

'Hey!' Jack says, ruffling Evan's hair. Lisa gestures with the proffered hairbrush, and Evan backs up to stand facing out between her knees. The conversation is over. Is it? Is it that easy?

Evan smiles. 'I could make him clean my room.'

Ianto snorts. 'Good to see that you're already drafting her for war,' he says, and then stops. Jack raises an eyebrow at him, and he's found the damning word in there, the little pronoun that makes Lisa pause midway across Evan's scalp. They all wait, because someone has to say something.

'If it's a girl,' Evan says sagely, 'maybe we can exchange her for a boy, like Ioan did with his hamsters.'

***

Saturday comes and goes in a blink. One second Ianto is standing in the middle of a herd of seven-year-olds, holding a cake aloft and wondering if the phone will ring and Gwen will tell them that the apocalypse is here, and the next minute he and Lisa are semi-conscious on the sofa, crepe paper stuck to their arms and Jack and Evan are in the shower, singing something about paw-paws and prickly pears.

He looks at her, eyes closed, ghost of a smile on her face, the elastic from the party hat still cutting into her chin. Her fingers toy with a balloon, and she bops it off her fingers, the rubber making a faint drumming noise. He'd blown all of those balloons up this morning, all thirty of them. He'd counted.

She must sense him staring, because she opens her eyes and rolls her face towards him, stretching her legs out and putting them on the coffee table. 'So Mister, you want another one of these?'

It's enough to jar his train of thought. 'What?'

'Another kid. Another sprog. A bookend.'

He can feel his eyes darting, even as their gaze only covers the span of her face, her features open and still somewhat amused. In the loo, Jack and Evan have moved from the shower to the sink, and Jack is telling him a story about how the Haerzogs of Gavrius only have one tooth, so they take meticulous care of it because if they lose it, they have to spend the rest of their life drinking through a straw. What follows is a shouting match of the most joyous sort in which Jack and Evan reenact the lost strawdrinking rituals of Gavrius, and Lisa and Ianto sit there and take it in, snorting at the really slurpy parts.

'Yes,' he says to her when Jack and Evan quiet down, probably comparing their flossing skills. 'Yes, I think we should have another one.' He pauses. 'Because it's already there, and seems a shame to…waste it,' he finishes, feeling slightly awkward for talking about their possible future child like that last banana on the counter that he might as well eat because it'll turn by the next day.

Lisa blinks at him, and he wonders if he's blundered somehow. Generally, they've been together long enough for him to avoid most landmines, but sometimes you come to a new field you've never seen before, and that is harder to guess at. He almost cringes when she starts to move, but she just leans forward and baps the balloon off his forehead.

'Okay.'

He listens to the water shut off, and then the thunder of bare feet slapping through the hallway to Evan's room. 'What about Jack?'

Lisa snorts. 'What about Jack?'

And that says it all. Jack had never been the issue, then, just him, and Ianto feels foolish for even suggesting it, and for not saying anything sooner. He had thought his opinions on the matter completely transparent. Perhaps glass of his viewpoint had been frosted over, one of those stained glass windows maybe with designs on it.

They sit here, staring at each other, and that is the way they are when Jack turns out Evan's light, closes the door in mid-sentence, something like, '—zero charisma!' and then pads in to flop down next to them, a hand on Lisa's thigh.

'Now _that_ was a party,' he murmurs.

Ianto stares at what he thinks is a fork planted in the cushions of the overstuffed chair. 'Next year, we hire out a hall or something.'

Jack snorts. 'Next year, strippers,' and when Lisa half-heartedly slaps his arm, he says, 'Tasteful! Dressed like Digimons!'

That punchline is only funny because Ianto can testify that Jack still doesn't understand Digimon. Neither does he, but he is smart enough not to lace them into the conversation.

Ianto doesn't know why Jack had put his clothes back on, but he has; maybe he wants to help them clean up, and Ianto appreciates the effort. There's a lot of random flotsam and jetsam (They find about fifteen wadded serviettes under the sofa alone and a mound of cake in a potted plant.). Jack carries the trash bag about, following Ianto as he scoops things up to bin. Lisa runs the autowasher and de-stickifies surfaces. After about thirty minutes, the house looks more or less itself, if one doesn't count the decorations that they leave up, because that's what you do for a few days, before the balloons shrivel and the crepe droops and the 'PENBLWYDD HAPUS' sign loses a few letters. If this were the Hub, Ianto would have cleared the decorations straightaway—no, this isn't the Hub. They would never have decorations at the Hub anyway, and if they did, they'd probably come from some alien machine that would then be like to kill them all.

Lisa stretches and retreats into the loo, and Ianto and Jack get ready for bed with uncharacteristic slowness. Jack sings under his breath when he undresses, something the kids had watched at the party, and he unbuttons his shirt, pulling it off in a little strip tease for Ianto.

' _Now I'm the king of the swingers,_ ' Jack sings, smirking and unbuckling his belt. Ianto doesn't bother to contain his smile as he sits on the edge of the bed and works off his socks. ' _Oh, the jungle VIP._ ' Jack's shirt hits the hamper. ' _I've reached the top and had to stop--_ ' Little hip shake, wow he's really getting into it. Ianto would suspect he was drunk, but he rather knows that Jack'd had three pieces of cake earlier and then run around with about a dozen seven-year-olds, and that's the source of his amusement.

'Do you really know all the words?' Ianto mumbles into his shirt as he yanks it over his head. He has patience for childishness, partly because it's a song stuck in Jack's head, and partly because it's completely harmless, and if they bitched about things that could bother them all the time instead of just letting them become background patter or yet another quirky thing, like a knot in a piece of wood, they'd all hate each other, and what would be the point of that?

Jack steps out of his trousers, toes them and flips them in the air so he can catch them without bending down. Ianto would clap but a trained monkey can do it. ' _I wanna be like you,_ ' says the male stripper unthreading his belt and tossing it and trousers off in opposite directions. ' _I wanna talk like you—_ '

Ianto grabs the waistband of Jack's shorts and yanks. 'I'm sorry I'm fresh out of notes,' he says, and they hear the shower turn on. Lisa must want a quick rinse. Ianto pushes Jack on the bed and stands so that he can shed his own trousers before bending over to reach for the thing he's stashed under the bed. 'But I am sure we can work something out in trade.'

Jack lies back on his elbows and wiggles his toes. 'Barter? Oooh, I do like barter. Haggle with me, Mister Jones.' Ianto crawls up his legs and sits on his midsection, thoroughly trapping Jack's hardening cock in his shorts and settled in what Ianto likes to call the 'proper English seat'.

Ianto digs into the little bag decorated with a red cross and pulls out the play stethoscope. 'I hear you're feeling ill.'

Jack watches him lay out the spring-loaded plastic syringe and the oversized and ineffective otoscope. Ianto puts the earpieces in and taps Jack's chest, bare and rising and falling with increasing speed as Jack's interest inflates with it. 'Oh yeah,' he says finally, wiggling. 'I feel real bad.'

Ianto leans forward so that he can press the foam-lined diaphragm to the skin in front of him; the toy is made for a three-year-old and so it's very short. It doesn't matter, really, because he wants to be close, his face inches from the warm skin laid out for him, the bare throat and the smiling face above it. 'Thump-thump, thump-thump,' he says, when he listens through the earpieces. It's not like he can hear anything, but that's not the point anyway. Fisher-Price is not concerned with usability, only a reasonable physical authenticity.

'That's not my heart,' Jack says, and shifts Ianto's hand over so that it is further left. 'Not that I'm the one with the medical training,' he corrects. 'Doctor.'

Ianto grinds on his lap, feels Jack's cock press into his underside and frowns, even when Jack groans and pushes up against him. 'Quite right. I was in the top of my class.' He sits up and brandishes the syringe. 'You're going to need an injection.'

That gets him another groan. 'Will it hurt?' Jack teases, pumping his hips again and sticking one finger into the underside of Ianto's shorts, at the bottom around the curve of his thigh.

'I'm afraid it will,' Ianto informs him gravely, wondering in his head where this is going, and yet not precisely wanting it to end.

Lisa leaves the bathroom in a plume of mist and tosses her robe on the chair in the room, crawling beside them and propping her head up on her hand. 'Oh, I put that in the charity box,' she says. 'He's outgrown it.'

Her fingers pick up the blood pressure cuff and wrap it around her arm, and Jack pumps the little bulb to make the dial spin. 'This doesn't look good.' He mock frowns.

Ianto takes the toy from his hands. 'I'm the medical expert here.' He makes a show of pumping the bulb and frowning. 'Oh dear, he's right.' Lisa's eyes glimmer with delight when he tsks. 'You need some ministration.' His hand pushes Lisa on her back and he shifts off Jack to kneel in between them. Part of this is sex, and part of this is just the amusement of the toy itself; if he has to admit, he's in a mood.

'What about me?' Jack says, peering through the otoscope before turning to look in Lisa's ear with it. 'There's potatoes in there.'

Lisa hits his arm, and Ianto grabs the toy from Jack's hand. 'I haven't forgotten you,' he says and pulls out the plastic plaster, molded into a hard open cuff. He has lost count of how many times he's put this on Evan's arm, a bracelet of sorts, and Jack raises an eyebrow at it.

'I like to think I'm adequately hung, Doctor Jones, but that's a little—'

He slaps the bracelet sideways on Jack's wrist, but it's much too small, so he adjusts his plans, hooking it over three fingers instead. 'There, now be quiet and let it work.'

Jack doesn't say anything, just raises an eyebrow and plays along with Ianto's nonsensical medical technique. Ianto slides the otoscope along the inside of Lisa's thigh. 'We should take a look, make sure everything is all right,' but as soon as he says it, he remembers, there's a baby in there, and he—

It doesn't feel right, joking about it. Soon someone will be looking, to make sure that everything is all right, and he's not going to have his little girl's first glimpse of the play doctor set be in utero. Even if she doesn't have a brain yet and is the size of, of something quite small.

Jack pulls him down to lie in between them so that he is facing Jack and Lisa is behind him, and Jack looks him in the eyes and Lisa presses her cold nose into his shoulder and whispers, 'Physician, heal thyself.'

There's a whine of the wind at the windows, a noise that Ianto has learnt to block out most of the time—they are quite high up, actually—but which sometimes punctuates his hearing as if it is the first time he has ever heard it. Lisa's hand finds his and she weaves her fingers in it, squeezing, and he wants to pulse back in Morse code that he is fine, that everything is all right, but sometimes, in these bare moments, when he says something that strikes him sideways, it's followed with a wave of unease that he used to call worry but which has revealed itself to be rather psychic. He'd mentioned it to Jack before, this sixth, no seventh sense, and Jack had said something dismissive about Torchwood One and their recruiting methods, but let it at that.

He thinks that some day he might pry at that lid, see what happens when it pops off. But today is not that day.

Jack takes the earpieces and fits them into his ears, then presses the diaphragm to the side of Ianto's skull. 'Amazing,' he murmurs, 'I can hear the ocean.'

Lisa laughs as Ianto tackles him off the bed.

Later, sated and happy, Lisa is curled bout him, and Jack behind her, and he can see the moon coming in the window, crazy and full. Maybe that's why all the kids were insane today. Who is he kidding? They were all filled with party excitement and refined sugar.

'When do you think it…?' Ianto asks into her skin, shifting a bit so that her hair doesn't tickle his skin as much. 'When do you think it happened?'

Lisa snorts and he can feel her lean back into Jack, just a centremeter or so, and Jack's top hand slides over her hip to rest on Ianto's. It's one of his favorite positions, actually, him on the end, in the cup of the spoon, because he can get up easily, but everyone is touching him. He doesn't like being what Jack calls 'the caboose' nearly as much as Jack does.

'Ianto,' Lisa says, her top hand sliding over Jack's so that they are both cupping his hipbone a bit. 'When a man and a woman and a man fancy each other—'

'I bet it was the anniversary,' Jack says, not even bothering to groan at Lisa's joke.

Ianto fuzzes a little, in his head, because that had been lovely. Not their wedding anniversary, no, because that is forever tinged with the sound of metal squealing and the smell of burnt concrete. No, they had all agreed upon, and Jack had been wise to suggest it, the day that Lisa had opened the blue police box doors and stepped onto Welsh soil with her own two legs.

Eight years, then, anniversary marked with a sleep over at Ioan Cooper-Williams's for Evan, and then a carousel of desserts, and assortment of alcoholic drinks in varying colours, a few dozen bouquets of marigolds, because as Lisa says, they look good against the skin. Then there had been a variety show of Jack's devising, actually, a little dress up crossdressing that had ended with Ianto in Jack's shirt, trousers and braces, Lisa in his suit, and Jack in one of Lisa's more forgiving negligees, topped with a form fitting pregnancy skirt and a blouse that was made to be shapeless and still sexy.

'Oh _yeah_ ,' Lisa says, in her best Jack imitation, then she thrusts her hips at Ianto's arse and there is a gentle chuckling from the end. 'Well, if we were going for quantity and—no that was indeed quality,' she finishes.

Ianto says then, 'Jack, are you ready to do this again?' Because he has to know. 'Are we all ready?'

The hand on his hip just strokes with a thumb, and though it stills for a split second on one of the upbeats, he can hear the smile in Jack's voice, a small thing that means that he's off his sugar high and had come twice earlier. 'I think seven or eight months is enough time to ease into the idea,' he says diplomatically. 'But if it's a girl, I get to name her, because I called dibs.'

Lisa rocks in between them, back and forth, a way to interject her 'Oi!' without saying it, because speech is starting to be an effort. Ianto thinks that he can just continue the conversation with his eyes closed, like when he's quite exhausted and "listens" to the end of the game on the telly and then doesn't remember who won.

'You can't call dibs on naming a child,' Lisa murmurs and then yawns in his ear.

Jack's hand lifts so that he can pull the covers up higher, up around their chests; his fingers settle back onto Ianto's hip before he can even feel his skin cool. 'Bethilda,' he whispers. 'Edna.' Lisa jolts/non-verbally protests. 'Madeleine.'

Ianto rolls forward so that he is on his belly and they fall with him a bit, so that Lisa is using his shoulder for a pillow, and Jack's fingers trail from his hip to the small of his back, where the tips just dust his skin and his hand hangs from the expanse of Lisa's waist. 'Madeline,' Ianto says, 'Like the biscuit.'

Jack laughs. 'Proust,' he says, but Ianto doesn't hear the rest. Lisa is already snoring face down into his armpit. He rearranges the press.

' _You'll see it's true,_ ' Jack sings to himself as they drift away, his fingers running up and down Ianto's back. ' _Someone like me can learn to be like someone like you._ '

 

 **LISA:**

Lisa doesn't particularly like being pregnant. She had last time, until it had gotten unwieldy, but this now, she is often ill. The well-meaning women she works with at the florist's tell her that her heartburn means that her baby will have a full head of hair, but she rolls her eyes and resists the urge to point out that there's a massive chance any kid she ever has will have a full head of hair, and that Evan hadn't made her ill, and he'd had a little fro.

Pregnancy: bringing out the helpfulness in every mother on the planet.

On the other hand, she thinks as she gets off the bus and sighs, at least people give up their bus seats. She'll miss that. She checks her watch, shoulders her bag, and speed walks the quarter mile to the security gates before pressing the combination for the code that will get her in the front door of the compound. Then she can throw rocks at the CCTV camera until Ianto comes to get her. Sure, she could just call him, but she likes to be a pain in the arse.

The camera must have picked her up, though, because Ianto is waiting at the door to the inner gates, his arms crossed. He's already taken off his suit jacket and waistcoat and the tie is tucked in between the buttons of his shirt. She tilts her head and studies him. Does he know that he's gone slightly gray at the temples? Thirty-seven and gray, oh la la. Sexy.

'Mrs. Miniver, find any pilots in your back garden lately?' he asks. Lisa always forgets why they tell her that. Jack started it years ago, and it had worked then, but it doesn't apply now, and the less it applies, the more Jack and Ianto find it amusing. So she pretends that it's just something sexy. Again, with the sexy; hormones have narrowed her mind to one track only, and it has access to her bus pass.

He holds the inner gate open for her, and then they walk down a covered walkway, and he finally keypads a huge sequence in, swiping a card which bypasses the rest of the codes he would have to enter manually if he forgot the card (Ravi is a genius, but he forgets his keys and wallet too often). Finally, they step into the main area of the Hub, all concrete and small spots of matted Berber carpet, metal rails and high-vaulted ceilings, skylights that are tempered to be opaque from the outside.

She doesn't often come to the Hub. In fact, she can count on one hand the number of times she's been here since it had been relocated, and when she counts the old Hub, that number only rises to part of the second hand, so that she is here is monumental. And she doesn't have anything with her, no food or extra clothes (Okay, she has on more than several occasions dropped off clothes for them, but that doesn't count because she throws them in a plastic bag and lobs them over the outer gate on her way to work. Hey. It gets the job done.).

'Where is everyone?' she asks, peeling off her coat and tossing it on his desk. Ianto's desk is a neat monstrosity—large and organised, full of angles. Very stacked and wooden and in general a representation of himself in a lot of ways, this old wooden thing in the middle of all this new concrete and glass.

Ianto leans on the railing behind him, and beyond his shoulder she can see the dip in the floor plan and the recessed nature of the autopsy bay, next to the separate med bay (That had been her suggestion, that they keep the dead things separate from the live things--just because she doesn't pull a paycheck from Torchwood doesn't mean that she doesn't think about this stuff.).

'Gwen has a dentist appointment, and the others have gone out to a crash site in Caerphilly.'

'Leaving you to mind the fort,' she murmurs, sitting on the edge of his desk and bumping one of his colour-coded baskets with her rear. His eyes cut to it and he crosses his arms.

'Leaving me to mind the fort,' he returns. 'I could stage a coup.'

'You could.'

'You could help.' He pushes off from the railing and saunters up, pushing her legs apart and standing in the V of them. 'We could rule South Wales for—' He checks his watch. 'The forty-five minutes until Gwen is due back.' There's a pinging noise and they both look at the array of computers from the tech station. Ianto laughs. 'Ravi's been trying to make this thing work. Claims it's a wish machine.'

Lisa tilts her head up so that she can look at his face. 'Now that's a novel and dangerous idea. Is it ever going to work?'

Ianto smiles and then fists one hand so that he can tilt her chin, like in an old movie right before the big kiss. Oooh. 'Not if I keep dismantling it every night. We have enough problems without giving Ravi his own Aladdin machine.' He dusts her lips with his before she opens them, and kissing is so easy, it always was with Ianto, way way back, before London wrecked them for a while.

Back when they were dating, when Ianto was still trying to hide his estate past, he used to play gentleman too much, too polite, not demanding, not even in bed. Lisa had almost dumped him, because sometimes a girl needs a hard fucking. She doesn't even remember what it was that loosened that façade's noose, but it had, and even with the distinguished gray and the feathering kisses and the tie and the Saville row, he's in there, it's part of him, and she'll tease her hard-fucking boy out in due time. Like she always can.

For now, best to enjoy the stroking on her arms and her neck, the warmth of his breath against her cheek, the sharp inhalation she hears when she reaches to his trousers and palms his soft cock through the wool.

'Speaking of wishes,' she murmurs. 'I am a woman on a mission, and with an hour window.'

Ianto smiles, she can feel it on her cheek. 'Ah, wait, Jack has a word for this.' He pulls back and they say it in unison in their best American accents: 'Booty call.'

She laughs into his shirt and enjoys the warm press of her belly against him. Seven months isn't too pregnant, but it's enough to make everything slower, and when she hugs people, they are far away. Ianto runs his hands along her belly. 'Have I mentioned that I love modern maternity clothes?' His fingers play at the bottom edge of the shirt that stretches taut over her belly, and when his hand rounds the front he pushes on her belly button, already a little stuck out.

'Don't—' she warns. She knows what's coming.

'When it pops out, does that mean the kid is done?' he asks and she thumps his chest with her fist. 'Look, some jokes are just…if you let them lie there, then a fairy dies or God kills a kitten or something.'

Lisa leans back against the desk and swipes with one arm so that one of the coloured baskets crashes to the floor. Ianto stares at it forlornly, and then back at her when she smiles. 'Oops?'

His hands push her back and she comes to rest on her elbows, watching him roll her top up over her belly so that he can kiss his way down her skin, the line under her navel that leads into her trousers before he tugs at the waistband and helps her to slide them down. He even pulls them from her feet and lays them over the colour-coded box on the end. 'Outbox,' he says with a crooked grin, a crooked tie, a crooked everything.

When he comes to stand in between her legs again she quirks an eyebrow. 'So, how do you want to—' he collapses from view with a lingering hand on her belly and a small tug to her thighs and then she feels his mouth on her cunt and she simply falls the last few inches back on the surface of the desk. 'Oh, okay then.'

It's about thirty minutes later when they have used about fifteen mango-scented wipes to clean themselves and Ianto's desk, and most of the papers have been retrieved. Ianto is glaring at a scorch mark on the far wall made when some piece of alien tech had fallen from his desk and bounced on the floor before burning a hole in the cement. She tugs her shirt in place and smoothes out the elastic of her waistband. The elastic is about three inches wide, and so it bunches and flips and someday someone will create maternity slacks with an elastic waistband that is better than this. She notices that half of her trousers have rubber inside the waistband to prevent sliding, but that just makes the whole band roll down in a tube and oh, she only has two more months to go, and it's not a mumu, so that's a plus.

She reaches for her bag and pulls out a paperback, waving it at Ianto. 'I brought that Fowles for Claire. I'm going to toss it on her desk, okay?'

Ianto mumbles something, but he is trying to straighten his tie and move the desk back to its original position a foot over at the same time, so she slides into the med bay and down the stairs to Claire's desk, where she leaves the book on the side, but more importantly, she pulls the envelope from in between the pages, checks that it is still sealed (why wouldn't it be?) and sticks it perpendicular so that it is obvious that it is there. A small note for Claire, yeah, about the book, perhaps an invitation to supper or a spa day, something like that if anyone asks, but no one will. And that's good. For once she is glad that everyone at this Torchwood is still rather tetchy about personal boundaries and how important they are. Not even Gwen will pry into a private letter, not like they might have in London.

God, she hasn't thought of London in years, and yet here she is, in the Hub for less than an hour, and things are already starting to smell like scorched ozone and the carcass body dumps that they created when converting—

She claps her hands once, and it echoes. The sound severs the train of thought, just like the therapist had taught her years ago when she'd seen her for trauma.

'You okay?'

She turns on the smile, turns on her heel, gives the book a nudge as if that had been what she was doing all along, and heads for the stairs, shouldering her purse. 'Yeah,' she says, 'Just got lost in thought.'

Ianto escorts her to the outer gate, and as they leave, Gwen breezes in, her boots clacking on the asphalt, her leather jacket long and slapping about her calves. Lisa stops to think about how that makes her look taller, in charge, the leather her own symbol of power, the length something borrowed from the authority figure at whose knee she learnt everything.

Gwen smiles and waves. 'Oh!' she says, 'I've missed you! I should have come back earlier.'

Ianto places his hand on the small of Lisa's back, she can feel it there like a brand. 'Oh, yes, it could have been old times.'

Gwen passes them and swats Ianto's arse. The reference isn't lost on her, and it's pleasing that it doesn't bother her either. 'If only! I've just had three cavities filled. I'm off in search of a painkiller.'

Lisa wants to ask her if she misses it, but Gwen doesn't even look back when they kiss at the gate, just barrels into the Hub at the same pace, not a mad dash to get away, not a lingering gaze in their direction. Not a glance at all. She thinks of the envelope on Claire's desk and wishes that she could do the same.

 

***

'Can I change my name to Harkness?' Evan says as he stirs the pudding at the counter.

Lisa turns and unties the apron strings from around her neck, letting the top half of the apron flip down and hang over her belly. 'What?'

Evan glances at her. 'If I wanted to, could I change my name to Evan Harkness?'

Lisa doesn't answer that but counters with one of her own, opening a drawer for a box of cellophane. 'Why do you ask?'

Evan blinks up at her from his perch on the stool at the kitchen island; his stirring technique is meticulous and strangely familiar. It could be Ianto's precision in the kitchen. It could be the tight circles that Jack makes with the cloth when he cleans his weapon. 'There are a lot of kids named "Jones" at school.' He shrugs. Lisa sets out the glass cups and he lifts the bowl to pour the pudding into each of them.

'But you're the only Hallet-Jones, right?' The pudding is getting into the bowls, but it's an effort. Evan isn't adept at holding the edge of the bowl and scraping with the spoon, so she holds the bowl and lets him guide the flow of chocolate.

Evan doesn't seem to be irritated that she hasn't answered his question. She sometimes wonders if he simply doesn't mind meandering his way to answers, like some reverse engineer who finds that the process is just as important as the resolution. 'That's because daddy is my real daddy, right?'

Lisa lowers the bowl, and Evan looks up at her before using the spoon to smooth out the tops of the four cups. She'll take it from him and do "scrapies" herself. What she wants to say is, _What makes you say that?_ but that's transparent, and Evan knows she knows the answer to that.

She had thought that they would have more time than this.

'Well, I don't actually know,' is what she says. 'He could be.'

Evan licks the spoon. So much for "scrapies", but he gives it to her, his lips stained dark brown, and he wrinkles his nose. 'Sophie Davies has two mummies, but no dad. No daddy. Could it be like that?'

Oh Jesus, he's going to hit all the big notes today. Lisa wishes that Jack were here, because he'd give Evan some sort of song and dance that would distract him, or Ianto even, who would play logic cop to her emotive cop. That he blinks those light brown eyes up at her and waits means that he trusts her though, so she gives him what she has.

'Daddy and I met Dad years before you came along, and we…sometimes you can't help who you fall in love with,' she amends. 'Most of the time it's just two people who love each other, but sometimes it's more.'

Evan nods. 'Could you fall in love with more than two people?'

She scrapes the chocolate pudding from the sides of the bowl and holds it out for his mouth, which opens like a trapdoor. 'I suppose you could.'

Evan swallows. 'Like _fifty_ people?'

Lisa bites back her response of, _Now_ that _is something you will have to ask Dad, when you are much much older,_ and instead she sets the bowl in the sink and says, 'That might be a bit much. Do you know how many valentines that would be?'

Evan smiles. 'That would be a lot of Christmas presents.'

Trust him to have broken it down into monetary gain. Materialism, thy name is child. 'Does it bother you? That you have two fathers, then?' she asks, because it nags at her. There's nothing she can do to change that, and she would never change it anyway, but knowing would give her something to work on, to smooth out, like finding wrinkles in a seam before ironing.

Evan leans on the counter and wiggles his bum back and forth, his head wagging in the opposite direction, as if he has a little tune in his head. 'Naaaaaah,' he says, and then stops, his eyes catching hers, wicked. 'Though since I have two daddies, I _should_ get more presents.'

She snorts. 'That is something you should take up with your other parents. They might listen.' She rips the cellophane and presses it down into the cup, right on the surface of the pudding so that no skin develops, then she tears off another piece and another, repeating the action until all four cups are covered and she can pop them on the bottom shelf of the fridge. Evan watches her intently.

'But if I wanted to, some day,' he says decidedly. 'I could change my name to Harkness?'

Lisa lifts the tray and swallows, and then she smiles, because it's nothing, really, nothing at all. 'I'm sure you could,' she tells him.

Evan considers this, like he considers all things, bopping head and eyes lost in thought, the same face he gets when he's choosing which chestnut he wants for conkers or debating the ramifications of not getting pudding because he doesn't want to finish his veg. He sighs then, as if it's _all just too much_ , and then he gets down from the stool.

'Nah. If I change my name, I want to be Bruce Wayne.'

***

Ianto's dinner and pudding are on the lower level of the fridge, and Jack has only stopped in for an hour, to grab supper, because they decided long ago that it was important to make an effort. A third of the time it falls through anyway, so Lisa doesn't even want to know what it would be like if they didn't try like hell to make time for family dinners. Jack sits next to Evan, across from Lisa, at the round table that they bought because it doesn't have a head (Ianto had come back with it from IKEA one day after Evan had almost run his stick horse and his temple into the corner of the old one.).

Evan relates his day in short bursts of conversation and waving papers from school. He likes to show Jack all his schoolwork because Jack draws pictures in the corner with a pencil as he reviews each one: a star for very good, a weevil face for very bad, a T for troll, he says, and she has no idea where he got that. Sometimes he brings one of the stampers from work, filched from under Ianto's watchful eye, and Evan then has pages of papers marked, "WHITEHALL ONLY" or "FILE: HARMLESS".

Evan has no idea what Ianto and Jack, and Uncle Ravi and Aunties Gwen and Claire do, but he understands that it is a very important job, and they cannot talk about it, and in his head that means that they are all spies. Possibly because he is seven, possibly because Ianto has been letting him watch James Bond movies when Lisa isn't home. They think she doesn't know, but the other day, she'd heard Evan in the mirror say, 'Jones, Evan Jones. Dun nuh, DUN nuh, nuh nuh nuh, NUH nuh, nuh nuuuuuuuuuh.' It has to be a guy thing. She'll leave that to them.

They finish the pudding (for pudding, Jack thinks that's funny) and Evan drags out a million toys he wants to play with, and Jack has to ruffle his hair and tell him that he has to go. Evan knows that Jack has to go back to work, but he tries it every time. It's almost a ritual in and of itself, this stalling tactic. Jack takes a long time finishing his coffee, rolling down his sleeves, buttoning his cuffs. He pulls his braces back up and sticks his feet into his boots at the door. It takes a full fifteen minutes. Evan comes around for a few more passes with papers and things that he needs to show Dad _right now_ , and then ekes a promise out of him to help build a fort from the sofa cushions over the weekend, and Lisa senses that there will be blankets and popcorn and secret passwords that she will have to guess if she wants to go from the hallway to the dining room.

She stands in the hallway when Jack bear-hugs Evan and whispers something in his ear, some secret that she is not in on, maybe, some little private language that they have, and Evan speeds off to his room, mumbling something about maths homework, possibly a comic book.

Jack shrugs on his coat and she crosses her arms, setting them on the top of her belly. 'Do you want to take Himself his supper?'

Jack considers this. 'Keep it here. I bet Ravi got take-away. You know how he is.'

They snort. Ianto will eat half of Ravi's take-away and then come home at eleven and stand in front of the open fridge door, eating from the plate and mumbling, "I shouldn't be eating right before I go to bed." Then in the middle of the night he'll roll over and say, "Why did you let me eat that piece of chicken?" They have long given up on the fact that Ianto is somewhat of a binge eater, brought on by meticulous detail to every other aspect of his life and a stubborn refusal to believe that he is no longer twenty-two, with the metabolism of a twenty-two year old.

She brushes at nothing on his shoulder when he shrugs his coat on, and wonders when she got so domestic. A glance down reminds her that she is barefoot, pregnant and wearing a dress. Makes a liberated girl want to go get a pair of assless chaps and a whip. Some high heeled boots. A power suit. A—

Well, that's all surface anyway.

Jack snaps his fingers. 'I almost forgot--Claire gave me this to give to you,' Jack says, pulling the letter-sized envelope from his pocket and handing it to her. He raises his eyebrows. 'Clandestine acts?'

She takes the envelope from him and turns it over. Still sealed, just her first name written on the front. 'Yeah, clandestine,' she murmurs before trying to toss it casually on the tabletop.

Jack plays with his collar. 'Anything to worry about?'

She tilts her head and looks him in the eyes. She looking for a sign, any sign that he might know what's in that envelope, and if he knows then he's not showing. Jack's a great liar. He gave them all lessons (No really, lessons, one night he'd drunkenly laid it all out for them: "The first step is to make your heart rate stay steady, no sudden spikes, and you have to look them in the eyes, but not too much. Eye contact is key.").

She had been an exceptional student. 'Nothing. Just a few secret possible birthday things that you are not allowed to know.'

Jack makes a surprised face, but it's fake. 'Does it involve lickable things?'

Lisa falls into the rhythm of the lie, because now it's real, a narrative that she can expand on. 'What kind of advice could Claire give me on edible sexual items, and would you really want it from the Torchwood medical officer?'

Jack smirks. 'There are _things_ in the archives. Things in jars that I know for a _fact_ \--'

Lisa reaches out with one hand and flicks his nose with her index finger. 'If I tell you, then it's not a surprise. I have said too much already.' She makes a mental note to do something edibly kinky for Jack's agreed upon birthdate.

Jack kisses her goodnight, vows to send Ianto home at a decent Torchwood hour, and heads out the door with a full stomach and a smudge of lip-gloss in the corner of his mouth. She throws the deadbolt and then turns to the envelope on the table, a flat bomb that could detonate everything they have, if she doesn't decide what to do with it.

It's been a week since she had gone to the Hub and seduced her husband so that she could leave Claire a secret letter. A week of worrying, _What if she never got it? What if someone else found it? What if Ianto opened it? What if Claire read it and was offended on her teammates' behalf? Her boss's behalf?_

Whatever the case might be, Claire has sent something, and opening it will start a whole chain of events that can never be ignored or undone. Lisa sits at the round table and lays the envelope flat in front of her on the placemat, still sticky with spilt juice. In his room, Evan is singing to himself as he thumps about, possibly playing pretend, or maybe organising his mountain of toys from one place to the other. He likes to reorganise a lot. All his little habits and traits, all his quirks will cease to be tiny clues when she opens this envelope and gets the results of the hair she'd passed along to Claire.

The script on the front, Claire's handwriting, is loopy. Big L. The dot on the I is a little circle. Had it been intended? Is it something that she just does? It's not a heart or anything, just a little circle. Did she carefully write Lisa's name out, or hastily scribble it with these big puffy-looking letters? There is no slant to them. Looks like the writing of a teenager, not the writing of a thirty-something woman with a medical license and at least five years in Torchwood under her belt. Oh, but what is that supposed to look like anyway?

Evan races out of his room, hands her three action figures, then says something about 'Captain Man' and bolts away again. She sets the action figures (Wolverine, The Punisher and apparently Luke Skywalker; that she even knows these things often gives her pause) to the side and picks up the envelope, smells it. It smells like paper.

'Muuuuuuuuum,' Evan calls from out on the patio, so she stands, gathers the figures and the envelope and saunters outside, to where Evan is making some sort of battlefield in her petunia beds. She lays Wolverine, the Punisher and Luke where she is directed to put them, and then stands at the edge of the balcony, holding the letter in both hands.

It would be so easy. Open the letter and read the results, know for the rest of her life. She could keep it a secret, right? Or would knowing colour the way she treats them, the strange equanimity they have fostered, nurtured for over ten years? Would it change the way she treats Evan? In her heart of hearts has she already decided whose he is, and would knowing the opposite change something in them both, like changing the course of a river?

The envelope flaps in her hands like wings of a butterfly.

She folds it in half, and then in half again, and slips it into the pocket of her dress. It's too much now. Later, maybe. Or maybe she'll tuck it into a hatbox, a paperback, the trainers box she uses to collect all the things that Evan draws for her, makes for her, just one more valentine lost in a sea of "I lov u mummy" and Mothering Sunday cards. But it will be there, even if she never touches it. It will be there for Evan, if someday he wants to do more than change his name to Harkness. If he wants it.

He'll have to be older, she thinks as she watches him, the same time he loses his virginity, moves out and/or gets a tattoo. Like thirty. Jack and Ianto would both laugh at her now.

Evan hands her Spiderman. 'He's a normal bloke, but a spider bit him, and now he's special,' Evan says, then lifts up Wolverine. 'He's got a healing factor that makes him live forever.'

'I see,' Lisa says, settling into a folding chair next to the wall flowerbed at waist height. 'And that?'

Evan holds up the Mary Jane doll that Lisa had insisted they get. Mostly because she had been in a mood, feeling her assless chaps and leather whips that day.

'Oh, Mary Jane is all right. She's married to Spiderman.' Evan looks at her. 'But Wolverine lives with them.' He tilts his head. 'You know.'

Lisa smiles at him. 'Yeah. I know.'

 **IANTO:**

He's on field duty today. He gets to drive down to Rhoose with Ravi, because they had made a schedule: he and Jack trade off days at the Hub, and today is Jack's day to stay close to home, just in case Lisa goes into labour. It is a good plan, and ensures that neither of them go stir crazy at the Hub, and also it splits their resources. Aside from Gwen, Ianto is senior field agent, and so it's only natural that he go out, just not with Jack, because with their luck, Lisa's water would break while they were scaling Snowden in search of the last Gleeph ship that crashed to Earth.

He likes field duty, he tells himself as his hands clench the steering wheel and he waits for Ravi to get back from the public toilets. Ravi had had fifteen cups of tea, and now he is making the trip long and boring with stops along the way. It's not like Rhoose is that far, but the traffic has been murder, and they are no closer to getting to the location of the readings.

Next time he's making him piss in a bottle.

Ravi opens the door and tumbles inside, tossing a bottle of Irn-Bru at Ianto. 'For you, the spoils of war.'

Ianto rolls his eyes, but he tucks the bottle in the cup holder. If they broke down in the country (just the thought of it makes his skin crawl), they'd be happy for any extra supplies, and a bottle of warm Irn-Bru special might make all the difference. Once he and Gwen had been stranded for three days in a small box (Really, that was all. A box outside of time and space) with just three Flake bars and a can of Lilt, so it wasn't as if he didn't have perspective on the idea.

Rhoose is a nice little village, but they're more concerned with what is going on underneath it. Ianto and Ravi strap on the stab vests, not because they're afraid of bullets, but more because they are worried about errant weevils, and those fuckers, as Ravi says, come out of nowhere. Claire has reminded them for the millionth time that if their torsos get cut in the sewers and then gangrenous, she'd have to amputate.

Doctor humour.

They find the sewer access and dive in, Ravi chattering away about their find. Potential find.

'The thing is off the charts in the blue line levels and in the particle disbursement,' he says and Ianto is thankful that he knows everything, otherwise he might have no idea what Ravi is talking about. 'The last time it blipped was about six hours ago, and it was a pulse, like—' Ravi flutters the hand that's empty and it bangs into a pipe, coming away grungy with something, and he stares at it. 'Oh Jesus,' he swears, wiping his hand on his stab vest. Ianto sighs. Oh it's not as if he isn't going to have to soak them in bleach and possibly run them through an industrial wash anyway.

'Do try to be careful,' Ianto reminds him, which is ridiculous, as Ravi has ten years of this under his belt. Well, close to it. Oh dear god, ten years, and Gwen has more and Ianto, well. If he were a betting man, he would say that someone was due for something nasty.

It's the sewer. The sewer always makes him twitchy and, as Jack usually says in his best good ol' boy voice, "all creepified and the like".

'So then like, the green light level on that scanner I cobbled together last year, and–holy fuck, man, this place reeks—it goes off and it's a good thing that I made it, because the Mainframe's pivotal sensors wouldn't have got it on this level.'

Ianto hands Ravi a torch and they start the slow walk through the sludge. Ianto hadn't even bothered wearing his wing tips out of the Hub; he'd put on jeans and wellies before he even walked out the door. Jack calls this his half-and-half, because he's still got the shirt and tie and waistcoat on. Ianto likes to think that way he looks official from the waist up, for all the times he stands behind counters or talks to security officers whilst sitting in the SUV. Stealth official.

'There's only one thing that registers even close to this from the files, so it could be one of them or something completely new,' Ravi says, choosing to bring the torch up to Ianto's face so that he can see him, but it's quite bright. 'Oh, sorry, mate.'

Ianto waves a hand and they start off. He'll follow Ravi for now. No reason not to.

'If I'm right, it's a Thropnsphere, and if it's corroded and it's still loaded—'

Ianto remembers the last one they had. A massive grenade built to take out what Jack called "Battle Cruisers" in a war that hasn't even happened yet, the Thropnsphere creates a small vacuum, like a black hole, and impacts everything in it's range into, well, just in. Imploding is the word Ianto would use. Jack had had a few words for it, but none of them had been useful.

'Does Jack know this theory of yours?' Ianto asks lightly, and Ravi ignores him, which means the answer is no. Ianto would have preferred to have his and Jack's situations switched for practical reasons, now. The last sphere they'd had had been old, detonators damaged on the trip through the rift, and Jack had wired it as best he could to reduce the range of the blast from three city blocks to about three feet and they'd set it off in the countryside. Ianto had never thought that dirt could do that, but the image of it blinking in and then showering out just a dusting, a mist when the dull _whump_ of the implosion had sounded, made him wonder what it would have done to a live creature, to a spaceship, to the three block radius of Butetown where they'd found it.

Jack would agree. He should be here. Ianto thinks about making the call. It's the smart thing to do. Jack should be here. Ianto and Ravi could stay while Jack drives here, and then once he was on the scene, Ianto could return to the Hub and someone would be there for Lisa if need be. In a pinch, should the deed occur in that rare two-hour window, Rhys or Gwen could be with her. It wasn't like babies were born within the first two hours of the water breaking, anyway. No there has to be a twelve hour labour, so that on birthdays Lisa can drag out the "I was in agony with you for thirty-nine hours" speech. That is the way of things.

He reaches up to his comm and ignores Ravi's mumbling about a measurement in yards. If it's close enough to be using yards, then they should start searching. The sphere is the size of a bocce ball, a comparison he only makes because that had been what Tosh had said the last and only time they'd found one.

He dials not the Hub line, but the other one in his touch dial on the headset—Jack's personal line.

It rings three times and then picks up. 'Hey Ianto,' Jack says, a little breathless. Ianto opens his mouth to talk, but Jack doesn't give him a chance, as if he had been the one to call in the first place. 'Don't want to alarm you, but—'

He sucks in a breath. 'It's started.'

Jack pauses and Ianto can tell he's walking through a hospital because he can hear the noises—the talking people, the faint tinny loudspeaker overhead, Lisa mumbling in the background. 'Yeah, and wow, it's, wow, man. The kid wants out like, now.'

Lisa's been at two centimeters for the last week, despite not being due for another four days. Ianto hates birthing math, based on a lunar cycle that he knows way too much about because he catches space scum for a living.

'Centimeters?' Ianto says as he steps over some debris and checks his watch. It's six fifty-eight. If they pack in now and head back, sphere or no sphere, they wouldn't get there until quarter till.

There's a mumble, Jack's hand is on the phone and then he's back. 'Eight. Seriously, I think—'

The phone cuts out and Ianto kicks the debris in front of him. It launches across the sewer and splats into a wall. Ravi looks up.

'Oi! That's nasty.'

Ianto runs a hand through his hair. 'Lisa's having the baby,' he says, as if he wants Ravi to make the call for him. They could come back for the sphere later. They could come back and find it gone. They could leave and come back later and it could detonate. It could be a dud.

Ravi stands and shrugs. 'What do you want to do?'

Ianto presses on his comm, and Gwen answers. 'Daddy-to-be, congrats!'

'Yeah,' he says, taking the scanner from Ravi and checking it again. It's here somewhere. 'Look, I lost Jack, can you tell him to—'

Gwen snorts into the phone. 'He's on speaker, here—' There is a plastic clicking of her fingernails on the deskphone and then Ianto hears Jack shouting to Gwen on the phone.

'—ost Ianto. Lis, Lis it's okay. Breathe—oh, okay, sorry—Gwen can you get Ianto? I—'

'Jack,' he says, 'How soon?'

There's a long scream, and he knows that scream. It's Lisa in pain-mode. He's heard it a great deal over the years, and it still makes the muscles in his face twitch. His free hand curls and his nails dig into his palm. Ravi turns off his comm and makes a face, taking the scanner back. Ianto unclenches his hand long enough to give him the V.

'Whoa,' Jack says, 'I don't think we need barbecue tongs, man.' And then the sound of Lisa hitting him, even Ianto can hear that over her groaning and Jack's forced jocularity. Then he hears, clear as a bell, someone say, 'No mobiles in the delivery room.' And Jack says a rare curse word and the line cuts out.

Gwen snickers. 'The second one is always so fast,' she says, sounding rather smug, and Ianto remembers that she's already been there.

'How do you even know that?' he grumbles. 'You have some old wives handbook, right?'

Gwen laughs. 'It's issued with your uterus,' she jokes. 'But no. Do you want me to come out? I can be there soon if I speed, and it's no trouble. Besides,' she adds, 'even if you don't get there in time, you should be there to protect the nurses and keep Jack from lighting cigars in the hallways.'

Ravi gives him a thumbs up and Ianto feels his shoulders lighten. 'Yeah, he's full of jokes, that one. Lisa's probably removed his pancreas with her fingers by now.' It's true. Jack is a bad Lamaze partner not because he doesn't get it, but because he gets it a little too much. Lisa prefers Ianto's low key methods and the ability to back off. Jack likes the "We're in this together!" approach, which might work for some, but not the woman who is currently pushing a basketball through—

'Hey, I got it,' Ravi says bending down and flipping a metal sheet over, something rusted out and dumped, how did it even get down here?

'You,' Gwen says into Ianto's ear. 'I'm on my way.'

Ianto clicks out and watches Ravi pocket the scanner so that he can pick up what is, after some dusting off, definitely a Thropnsphere. Ianto sucks in a breath. 'Okay then, look Rav,' he says. 'I know that you're excited, but I've seen one of these in action, and we have to be very, very careful.'

Ravi turns the Thropnsphere in his hands. 'Yeah, I read all about the last one,' he says absently. 'This one is—'

The Thropnsphere beeps three times and the lights on the front of it fire up red and green stripes. Ianto's stomach dips and Ravi freezes.

'Just—' he begins before Ravi cuts him off.

'It's on,' Ravi whispers. 'Oh bollocks.' He drops his torch so that he can hold the thing in both hands.

Ianto backs away, hits the wall and thinks, no no, this isn't what he's supposed to do. He thinks about imploding and what that must feel like, but then something reminds him of everything else, and the mental plating that comes around his thoughts in times like this, it settles into place and he sucks in a breath.

'Okay Ravi, don't move. We need to know what the settings are, so turn it--' He rotates his empty hand so that Ravi can see. 'Right, good, turn it and look at the read-out on the side by your left thumb.' He steadies his light as much as he can, which is difficult because he suddenly has the shakes.

Ravi doesn't turn the sphere so much as he twists and bends his torso so that he can read the display. 'It says, "five point two three nine".'

Ianto blinks a great deal for a few seconds, processing. Five point two three nine feet? Miles? Kilometers? Five point two three nine minutes? Five point two three nine hours, furlongs, yards, some space measurement that he doesn't know?

'I don't—' he begins.

'It's in kilometers,' Ravi says.

'How do you know?'

Ravi lifts the sphere directly up, so that he doesn’t turn it, but Ianto can peek at the display. Right there: _5.239 km_. Oh.

'That's why the readings were so insane,' Ravi murmurs, his face a little frightened, but still interested, ever the tech. 'Because it was on. Or dormant, or charging or something.'

Ianto shifts his torch to his other hand. 'We can find a way around this.'

Ravi presses a few buttons on it, biting his bottom lip so hard that the skin around it is white. 'I can change the perimeter of the blast, I think.'

'Can't you turn it off?'

'They don't make them with an off switch,' Ravi says quietly, as if he is turning something over in his mind. 'You should go. Head start.'

Ianto backs up for a second before he realises how ridiculous that is. 'They have to have a pin, like a grenade or something.' He watches Ravi press a few more buttons and the runner lights go from red to magenta. 'Ravi, you can hold on, and we'll get Jack—'

The Thropnsphere lets out a little whine like a charging camera flash and Ravi stabs the side of it with his fingers. 'Look, I can hold it off, but this little shit—' he presses another button down and his hands are starting to look like he's holding all the holes on a recorder. 'Is going to—oh.' The runner lights change from magenta to red again and then he starts to press the same button over and over. 'I get that now. You are clever, you thing…'

Ianto watches him and debates calling Gwen. His hand is reaching for his earpiece when Ravi grunts, the runner lights flash red on one side of the sphere and the green ones finally switch to a yellow tone. 'Oh, that's not,' Ravi says, talking to the machine. 'Why are you doing…? Oh.' His loose fingers roam over the surface of the bumpy metal sphere. 'God sometimes the future looks very scary, Ianto.'

Ianto snorts, because he agrees. So they can't turn it off. Could they drive it somewhere and get away fast enough?

Ravi stops pressing the button frantically and checks the display. 'I've got it down to feet, I think. But it could be meters, so you should go, because I can't be sure--'

'Oh. Could you just throw it? How far do you throw?'

Ravi smiles. 'Two of my fingers are holding down the distance settings. The switch is corroded, I can't even be sure that this is gonna do it, man.'

'But what if,' Ianto casts about, 'What if we found something to hold the switch down?'

Ravi sighs. 'Like what, chewing gum? I'm not MacGyver, this is real.' Ravi gestures with the sphere and one of the lights flickers. 'Oh it doesn't like that.'

'We could get a—'

'Ianto,' Ravi says, 'look, let's not make a big production number okay? Just go.'

'I'll call Jack, Gwen—'

'No.' Ravi looks up at his face then, dark curls flipping over his eyes. 'Call my girl.' Ianto reaches up for his earpiece and Ravi interrupts. 'No no, don't call her. I can't talk to her right—' He closes his eyes, and when he opens them again, they are something Ianto has never seen before. 'Tell her I love her and I wanted her to have my kids. Tell her I said, "Nothing on earth, baby," she'll know what it means.'

Ianto nods. His hand is clenched so tightly he feels the skin break.

Ravi swallows. 'Tell her that I remember everything she said that night, when she thought I wasn't—' He glances down at the beeping Thropnsphere in his hands. 'Tell her that I wanted that house and she was right, we should have got it, because she was right. Tell her I said that she was always right, from beginning to end.'

Ianto's brain is on record, taking down everything just in case, but his mind is still working. 'For Christ's sake—' but the sphere beeps and whines, louder now, something shrill that sounds like a weapon charging, and Ianto knows that noise. He'd heard it before, from behind the safety of a blast shield, over tiny speakers three miles away, the last time one of these had gone off.

Ravi winks at him. 'You better kiss that baby,' he says, watching Ianto back away, a few more feet down the hall. 'Never had one meself,' he says, sliding into an old accent that it'd taken him years to shed, to smooth out, like painting over a Goya to make a Chagall. 'Always thought I'd have the t—'

The sphere doesn't need a big climax, it just flashes, and Ianto hears a _whump_ like a body hitting a padded mat, and Ravi, and the five point two three nine feet around him disappears, pulls in, defies what should be logic and all science but actually is purest science, another way to make the laws of god useful for the wars of man. Cement dust and sewer water and blood punch out from the last little hole in the vacuum, a parting gift like the spray of the sea off the bay. Ianto feels it hit his face, grit and liquid and grease; it enters his frozen mouth, open like a gaped fish.

The ceiling above has been eaten away and the dirt above the sewer tunnels falls down through. There will be a hole, a cave-in. The floor under, five feet worth is gone, exposing dirt and tree roots and running water spilling about, sewer water sluicing through and into the hole to fill it. Even as he backs away until he hits the wall, Ianto is planning the call to the local government, the police, to get them here to prevent a collapse or injury from above.

His phone is ringing, a trill into the silence and water dripping and shifting dirt.

He presses the button with shaking fingers, not sure if he can wipe his face yet, his face with its covering of human oil and blood and other things.

Jack is breathless. 'Ianto!' he calls out loudly. 'Ianto!'

Ianto can feel himself sliding down onto the floor, and it's good that there's a wall behind him, because he's sure that he would be doing the same thing without it and that would be worse. 'Jack—' he starts, but Jack isn't listening, and in the background he can hear something high and shrill. Something that sounds like the shriek of the Thropnsphere as it had whined in Ravi's hands. But it's not, it's something else.

'Oh man, Ianto,' Jack says, and it takes Ianto a second after that to realise that the sound is a baby. 'Oh, Ianto, it's a girl, and she's gorgeous.'

***

 **JACK:**

He hasn't been to Ravi and Sandy's in years, never had a need to, really, and some part of him feels bad for that. Sandy hasn't been told anything, and the last three nights at Torchwood have been spent deciding what to do about all of that. Jack had suggested Retcon, only for the peace it might bring, but Gwen and Claire had vetoed him, offended that he had even mentioned it. He hadn't been set on it, and that level of Retcon usually caused more damage than it took care of, really, but he couldn't help but put it forth in an attempt to squeeze better answers from them all.

Gwen's solution, the last call, had been to tell Sandy. What else could they say? Sandy knows their faces, knows their names. She's been to their houses for dinners. Someday she would come calling, desperate for her husband, probably at a very unfortunate moment.

Jack had been reminded once again why he didn't like people in Torchwood having families.

Then the framed picture of his own had reminded him of just how hypocritical he is.

Gwen had stood in front of his desk, looking at Penny's little snapshot, a smile playing on her face, before she'd handed it back. 'Girls are trouble,' she'd said ruefully.

He'd shrugged. He'd had a girl before, but he hadn't reminded her of that because he hadn't really been a good father to Alice, so what would he know about girls? Then he had stood and said. 'Let's get this over with.'

He'd tucked Penny's picture into the front pocket of his shirt anyway. Just for today.

Now he stands on the veranda with Gwen, and they ring the doorbell, waiting for Sandy to open it. When she does, her face is a mess, red and blotchy. Her hair is tied in a ratty tail, and her clothes are rumpled and stained with coffee spills.

It's been three days. She has to know by now.

Jack watches Sandy's face, and he doesn't even pretend to be brave, to be macho, when Gwen's hand falls to her side and reaches for his, squeezing it. He needs it too, when Sandy examines their faces and what she sees tells her everything she needs to instantly know; her eyes harden a little, and her eyes dart to the SUV, as if she has to see that he wasn't coming, that they are there in their big government vehicle.

Jack is reminded of another time when this news was delivered by telegram. He doesn't enjoy being a typed piece of paper.

Her face crumples, and he tries to place where he's seen that before; Sandy's knees tremble but don't buckle. 'No,' she says softly. 'No, oh no, no no.'

Gwen reaches out a steadying hand. 'Sandy, we—'

'Oh no no no no don't—' Sandy retreats back into the house, leaving the door open, off on some mad tear that her brain is navigating for her body on auto-pilot. Jack can hear her mumbling. 'No no nono no…'

Gwen glances at him, and they venture inside. He'd like nothing more than to leave it to Gwen, but that's not right, not precisely her job (though one day it could be, right?), even though she's done this before with the police.

The house is a mess, in that way that houses get when the person there hasn't left in days and can't be arsed to clean up because they have better things to do like call their husband's now-imploded mobile repeatedly and his place of employment nonstop. Dishes are piled up in the sink and several days' worth of newspapers are flattened, open and picked through, as if Sandy has been searching for a missing persons report, something strange, something odd, maybe a glimpse of Ravi in the background of a crime scene photo.

They follow Sandy's voice to the back bedroom of the house, where she is in the middle of pulling on a pair of jeans and sticking her arm into a clean sweatshirt while stuffing her feet into a pair of tied trainers. 'You'll take me to hospital and let me see him, and I don't care what's wrong with him, it doesn't matter. I need to see him—'

It hits Jack then--the point hasn't been made because no one has said anything yet. He had taken it for granted that he knew about Ravi, but Sandy thinks that he's been hurt, albeit badly.

'Oh, Sandy,' Gwen says softly, 'Sandy, Sandy,' and Sandy looks up at her, her face taut, eyes wild, and Jack realises too that under all of this, she already knows.

'Which hospital?'

Gwen reaches out with one hand, but it doesn't connect with anything. 'Sandy, luv, I'm sorry but he's, well he's—'

'It was fast,' Jack says, because they have to cut through the crazy look in her eyes so she can get to the next part. Sometimes people are amazingly predictable, and Ravi hadn't married Sandy because she was a shrinking violet, no, quite the opposite, when her eyes widen in his direction, and she gets both her arms through the sleeves and working again. 'He didn't feel any pain. But he's dead,' he finishes.

He sees her coming a mile away, but stealth isn't her plan. She's flailing arms and anger, radiating in waves, and screaming and hatred and suspicion and knowing and violence, and he's willing to grab at her half-heartedly as she gets in a few good punches and swings to his chest and Gwen hovers behind her, unsure whether to pull her off or let Jack restrain her. He'll let it go on for a few seconds anyway.

Years ago he'd taken this beating from Owen, and then Gwen, and before her from a mother, a mother who'd watched the last good thing in her life skip off into a forest, never to be seen again. He deserves this beating, he thinks, deserves it because he'd let them go.

Or not, because that had been Ravi's job. Or not, because Ravi had been foolhardy, though who could have seen it coming, really? Or brave, because he'd done the right thing, saved everyone in a five-kilometer radius, saved Ianto, too, mustn't forget that. In his most horrible hour, Ravi had chosen to preserve life, and Jack has never been so selfishly grateful for that.

And perhaps that is why he deserves this beating, because Sandy would have preferred that Ravi had killed five-kilometers worth of people, killed Ianto, that's what she would want, even if later she might rethink that; for now, she would kill fifty people, a hundred, just to bring him back.

Jack knows the feeling.

Gwen pries Sandy off him, and he staggers back into the wall, arms crossing to protect his stomach as Gwen holds Sandy's arms and she kicks with her legs. Jack pulls the syringe from his pocket, the syringe he hadn't told Gwen about, and uncaps it, sinks it into Sandy's neck, watching as she slumps before he can even get the plunger fully depressed.

Gwen takes Sandy's weight well, but she mumbles a grunt of surprise, and when Jack helps her relocate Sandy to the sofa, she turns on him. 'What the hell was that?'

He caps the syringe and slips it into his pocket. 'Claire gave me a sedative.'

'Jesus, Jack,' Gwen breathes, but she doesn't argue further.

An hour later, Sandy is awake again and sitting huddled in an afghan that Jack remembers seeing in the Hub once. Had Ravi nicked it? No matter. Her hands cradle an undrunk mug of tea, and she stares at the floral patterns of the wallpaper border above the wainscoting.

They tell her what they can, and there's no harm in it, really, not that she'll blab to the press, and who would believe her anyway? They'll compensate her as much as she wants, relocate her if she wishes, paint her a whole new life if she demands it, or even if she just asks for it.

And since they had told her how he had died, Jack doesn't understand her next few words. 'Rav told me,' she said softly, 'he said that if he died you'd keep the body.' Her eyes bracket to his. 'I want it back.'

Jack wants to be direct with her, but he isn't sure how to do it delicately. Gwen does it for him. 'I'm very sorry, but, the way he…there is no…there's nothing for us to keep, even, but if we did have him, we would hand him over,' she says, and Jack lets her lie, because the first part is true, so it doesn't matter about the second. Maybe Gwen believes it. Maybe in this new Torchwood Gwen wants to shape, they will bring their dead home in caskets, caskets draped with a flag. Whose flag, he doesn't know. Torchwood should have a flag.

It would have a weevil on it, maybe a TARDIS, in a red circle with a slash. He should ask Ianto to mock one up, just for kicks. No, no he shouldn't.

Sandy doesn't believe them, and he doesn't try to dissuade her. She's not thinking clearly. Gwen presses her, says things about Ravi and what he wanted. She tells her what he told Ianto, word for word, and she cries, but for Jack it is all a distant panorama, supposedly wide and detailed but fuzzy and distant, ranging in scope like the dull hum of a nature special playing on the telly.

He is wondering about the future, and what Sandy will do. It isn't as if he's hasn't had to deal with the New World Torchwood before, but when the Hub had exploded and they had built above ground, Ravi and Gwen and Melissa (and later Claire) had stuck their heads out of the bomb shelter and decided that they liked the feel of it all up here, and this, in front of him, this sobbing wife who knows virtually everything, could tell virtually _everything_ (if she could find someone to listen), is something he can't deal with. It's complicated.

He thinks of his own family for a second, and of course that seems so uncomplicated because he's looking at it from the inside. He doesn't know Sandy like he knows Lisa and Ianto; she's a wild card, unpredictable, Emily Holroyd would have called her a threat to the Empire. So would have Yvonne, but in a different manner.

Good thing both those bitches are dead, then.

So Jack slips her more sedative when she's not looking, just enough to make her mellow, and Gwen calls Ravi's sister over in Adamstown, and they wait for her to show, explain their cover story—Ravi was in an accident on location at Blaidd Drwg, and crisis averted, but he's dead and they can't release the body. Radiation. It's been cremated. If Sandy tells a different story, Jack figures, little good it will do her, and anyway, say what he wants about footballer's wives, they know how to tow the party line when it counts, and Sandy's not stupid. He doesn’t know how he can tell what she'll do, he decides, but Gwen is willing to run on a tank of hunches, so he'll let that engine idle.

***

He drops Gwen off at the Hub and heads home. Gwen will cover for him for a few hours, so he can sit with Ianto, who is on enforced admin leave for the rest of the week. Lisa and Penny had come home the day after, and Ianto has been sleeping with the baby on the sofa while Lisa recovers, waking her long enough to get her to breastfeed and then they all pass out on the bed. Jack has lost track of how many times over the past three days he has found them all asleep, the baby barely attached to her breast.

He can't imagine the whole breastfeeding thing, doing it. It's bad enough, he thinks, that one has to surrender their body for nine months, but then you're supposed to keep on keeping on for another six to eighteen months or something. It dictates what you eat and drink and carves sections out of your day and oh, maybe he's just jealous.

He locks the doors of the SUV and heads up the indoor stairwell to the lifts. He's not jealous. Much.

Jack presses the button for the lift with his palm, then stands in front of the bank there, not realising that he's swaying until he catches sight of himself in the wall of mirrors at the end of the hallway. Maybe he's a little tired, too. Weary. That's a good word for it. Funny how some words sound like they feel, like sensual onomatopoeia.

Ianto is sitting on the sofa, Penny in his arms, and Jack hangs his coat up, checking his watch. It's one-fifteen, so Evan is still in school, but he'll fetch him later. Evan knows that he's supposed to be on his best behaviour, not just for Mummy, but for Daddy, who has been through Something Bad, and he knows that Uncle Ravi is dead.

Jack wonders if he should take Evan to the funeral. Will there be a funeral? That's what New World Torchwood does, right? Ravi's family will expect one, even if the casket is empty. Is this something they should do for Evan, so that he can understand the nature of life? Death? Grief? To cement in his head that Ravi is gone and not coming back? Jack will have to ask Lisa later, because right now he's not doing anything but sliding onto the sofa and reaching out for his baby girl.

She's warm when Ianto hands her over, and Jack doesn't want to hold her long, just enough, really. Just enough to smell her, to bury his nose in the crook of her neck and shoulder, to hear her wet mouth noises. It's true, he says, he's not good with kids, his hands are huge, he tells them, and that's all a lie, a joke to cover up the irrational belief that when they are this small, they are vulnerable to the elements and Jack is an element of peril. It's a superstition that he chooses to believe because he can't seem to shake it, so he'll hold her and kiss her and rock her, but he doesn't want to get too close, not until she can fend better for herself.

It's a thing. He'd explained it one night to Ianto, who had taken it better than he'd figured he would, and then proceeded to make Jack change Evan's diaper.

Lisa had remembered one thing, though, and despite his threats of Bettina and Agnes and Phlegm, he'd picked Penelope on his own, and he doesn't have to explain it to Ianto or Lisa; they don't ask and he won't divulge it. It's important, but not important in that way. And some day if she wants to know, he’ll tell her about her possible grandmother on some distant planet, not even born, not even a thought to be born.

Ianto takes Penny back and tucks her head into the bend of his elbow. Jack bites the inside of his cheek.

'Sandy isn't going to be a problem,' he tells Ianto.

Ianto doesn't look at him. 'I should think not,' he mumbles. 'Sandy is incredibly bright and level-headed.' He blinks and strokes one index finger down Penny's cheek, and she turns her head towards him, her little peanut brain on auto-pilot. Jack finds himself wondering already what she'll be when she grows up.

'She wanted the body,' Jack says, leaning down to unlace his boots so he can kick them off and curl his feet under him. His toes are inexplicably chilled.

'Of course she did. That's natural, wanting to see it, to prove it.' Ianto doesn't look at him still, and Jack wonders if he is angry. Why would he be? Angry at himself? Or sad? Or depressed? Or—none of them has been getting enough sleep, for more than the obvious reasons. Jack doesn't bother to say any of that, or the obvious thing about Ravi's body, because Ianto had watched it collapse out of existence.

'If it were me,' Ianto says, 'would you bury me? Or lock me in the morgue?' Jack doesn't even want to answer, doesn't even start, actually, before Ianto continues. 'Don't answer that. Just—you should let Lisa have a say in it, whatever it is.' He smiles at Penny's sleepy face. 'I have a will, you know, burial notes and things. Adoption papers prepped for you and Evan, and now Pen. You two are both bollocks at planning everything.'

Not entirely true. 'This is morbid,' Jack says. Entirely true.

'Not denying that, but necessary. I just…'

Jack throws one arm behind Ianto on the sofa and leans in. 'Then stop.'

'If…ah, you're right. Watch her eyes,' he says, distracted, and then he holds her up, just a little, in the air and those eyes open, bright and clear, and Jack sees Lisa reflected like a miniature portrait. 'I keep trying to get her to smile, but it's too soon,' Ianto says to him, laying Penny back down in the cradle of his arms and readjusting his feet up on the coffee table so that his knees are drawn up.

Jack watches Ianto's face, wondering what it had looked like, to see that happen, to see it happen so suddenly, to someone he was close to. Ravi had been with them for ages, since the last Hub. Ravi had, unlike Claire, known Lisa before, in her wheelchair. Ravi, whose wedding they'd all gone to. Ravi, who had left behind a legacy of projects and folders and computer programmes laced with hip-hop bombs that explode into bass and treble when they hit on the wrong thing in the computer. Jack wonders how long they'll be weeding his little jokes out of the system. Probably forever.

Just this morning he'd input his password incorrectly five times in a row, and his monitor had treated him to a song about 'lady lumps' that he could have gone for the rest of his very very very long life without hearing ever again.

They'd got Tosh out of the coding, but only because most of her work had exploded. Jack is slightly grateful for that because he isn't sure that he could deal with debugging both their codes at the same time. Not unlike the time he'd been digging in Owen's drawers in the old Hub and come up with a handful of scalpel.

He hears snoring and looks at the baby monitor sitting on the coffee table. Ianto laughs. 'She says she doesn't snore,' he reminds Jack.

Jack laughs. 'What do people do? Record it?'

Ianto lays his head back and closes his eyes for a second. 'She'd deny it. Even if we got visual.'

He's completely right, and recording the one you love snoring is not the way to your beloved's heart. That is a trip to the sofa bed, which they both know. Besides, after this long, well, it’s hardly a surprise.

'I was thinking,' Jack says, reaching out a finger and touching Penny's palm so that she closes her little digits around it, a Venus hand kid. 'We could get a dog. Wouldn't it be neat to have a dog?'

Ianto lifts his head, blinks again at Penny's closed eyes and lifts her minutely so that he can lay his lips along her forehead, the smooth brown skin of her perfect face, and he smells her. Jack hears the inhalation of his nose and when he breathes out, it ruffles her hair. Jack wants to do the same to him, to reach up and press his lips into Ianto's hairline, to kiss him gently there in a way that is so familiar. He wants to cradle the back of Ianto's head in his hand and lift his nose to smell the hair on his head.

Instead, he leans in and kisses Penny's perfect automaton fingers, jostling them back and forth in false joviality. Outside the gulls scream on the railing, and they look at them for a second before Ianto turns his face towards Jack's and blinks, as if he is surprised, as if something has just occurred to him.

'Jack,' he says slowly, and the hand under Penny's head shifts as he raises her up and lays her on his chest, her tiny puffy face snuffling into his collar. His eyes harden with certainty in his mind and he presses his other hand to Penny's little back, holding on for dear life. 'Jack, we have to get out of Torchwood.'

END


End file.
